Democratic President Bill Clinton on the TOP 10 Vetoes on Oil

Nancy Pelosi loves to blame President Bush for all of the countries problems but here are the facts about the Democrats and the last Democratic President Bill Clinton on the TOP 10 Vetoes


10) ANWR If Bill Clinton had signed into law the Republican Congress's 1995 bill to allow drilling of ANWR instead of Vetoing it ANWR could be producing a million barrels of (non-Opec) oil a day--5% of the nation's consumption. Although speaking in another context, even Democrat Senator Charles Schumer no proponent of ANWR drilling, admits that "one million barrels per day," would cause the price of gasoline to fall "50 cents a gallon almost immediately," according to a recent George Will column.

9) Coastal Drilling (i.e., not in my backyard) Democrats have consistently fought efforts to drill off the U.S. coast, as evidenced by Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz's protestation against a failed 2005 bill: "Not only does this legislation dismantle the bi-partisan ban on offshore drilling, but it provides a financial incentive for states to do so."
A financial incentive? With the Chinese now slant drilling for oil just 50 miles off the Florida Coast, wouldn't that have been a good thing?

8) Insistence on alternative fuels One of the first acts of the new Democrat-controlled congress in 2007 was an energy bill that "calls for a huge increase in the use of ethanol as a motor fuel and requires new appliance efficiency standards." By focusing on alternative fuels such as ethanol, and not more drilling, Democrats have added to the cost of food, worsening starvation problems around the word and increasing inflationary pressures in the U.S., including prices at the pump.

7) Nuclear power Even the French, who sometimes seem to lack the backbone to stand up for anything other than soft cheese, faced down their environmentalists over the need for nuclear power. France now generates 79% of its electricity from nuclear plants, mitigating the need for imported oil. The French have so much cheap energy that France has become the world's largest exporter of electric power. They have plans in place to build more reactors, including an experimental fusion reactor.

The last nuclear reactor built in the United States, according to the US Dept of Energy, was the "River Bend" plant in Louisiana. Its construction began in March of 1977.

Need I say more?

6) Coal "The liquid hydrocarbon fuel available from American coal reserves exceeds the crude oil reserves of the entire world," writes Dr. Arthur Robinson in an article on humanevents.com. The U.S. has approximately one-fourth of the world's known, proven coal reserves. Coal would be a proven, and increasingly clean, source of electric power and--at current prices--a liquified fuel that would reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Yet Dems and their enviro friends have fought, and continue to fight, both coal-mining and coal plants.

5) Refinery capacity "High oil prices are still being propped up by a shortage of refinery capacity and there is little sign of the bottleneck easing until 2010," according to Peak Oil News. And, while voters in South Dakota have approved zoning for what could become the first new oil refinery in the United States in 30 years, the Dems' environmentalist constituency vows to oppose it, just like environmentalists opposed the floodgates that could have saved New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina.

4) Reduced competition With consolidation in the oil industry, has come reduced competition. Remember, most of the major oil company mergers -- Shell-Texaco, BP-Amoco, Exxon-Mobil, BP-ARCO, and Chevron-Texaco -- happened on Clinton's watch. The number of oil refiners dropped from 28 to 19 companies during Clinton's two terms.

3) The Global Warming Myth At a Group of 8 meeting this week, host and Japanese Economy, Trade and Industry Minister Akira Amari "described the issues of climate change and energy as two sides of the same coin and proposed united solutions ... to address both issues simultaneously". As a result of Global Warming hysteria, the Al Gore-negotiated Kyoto Protocol created a worldwide market in carbon-emissions trading. Both 2005 --the year that trading was initiated--and this year --when the trading expanded dramatically -- saw substantial and unexpected price spikes in the cost of oil, leading us to reason Number...

2) Speculation "Given the unchanged equilibrium in global oil supply and demand over recent months amid the explosive rise in oil futures prices ... it is more likely that as much as 60% of the today oil price is pure speculation," writes F. William Engdahl, an Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. According to a June 2006 US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations report, US energy futures historically "were traded exclusively on regulated exchanges within the United States... The trading of energy commodities by large firms on OTC electronic exchanges was exempted from (federal) oversight by a provision inserted at the behest of Enron and other large energy traders into the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000." The bill was signed into law by Bill Clinton, in one of his last acts in office.

1) Defeat of President Bush's 2001 energy package According to the BBC, "Key points of Bush('s 2001) plan were to:

-Promote new oil and gas drilling

-Build new nuclear plants

-Improve electricity grid and build new pipelines -$10bn in tax breaks to promote energy efficiency and alternative fuels



A New York Times article, dated May 18, 2001, explained:


May 18, 2001
Bush, Pushing Energy Plan, Offers Scores of Proposals to Find New Power Sources
By DAVID E. SANGER with JOSEPH KAHN NEW YORK TIMES
Check out the Times Click Here article
NEVADA, Iowa, May 17 — President Bush began an intensive effort today to sell his plan for developing new sources of energy to Congress and the American people, arguing that the country had a future of "energy abundance" if it could break free of the traditional antagonism between energy producers and environmental advocates.
Mr. Bush's plea for a new dialogue came as his administration published the report of an energy task force containing scores of specific proposals — many that he can impose by executive order — for finding new sources of power and encouraging a range of new energy technologies.
His critics swarmed over the specifics, noting that the plan set no targets for improved energy efficiency, offered no short-term relief for out-of-control electricity prices in the West and provided only modest financing for research into clean energy technology.
The president appeared at a highly efficient heating and cooling plant near St. Paul that burns a variety of fuels, including oil, coal and waste wood, to sound a theme he plans to repeat day after day. The parties in the energy debate have "yelled at each other enough," Mr. Bush said. "Now it's time to listen to each other."
"Too often Americans are asked to take sides between energy production and environmental protection," Mr. Bush added, before flying here, to a farming town north of Des Moines, to continue his argument at a small biomass plant that makes power by burning materials derived from animal waste and plants. "As if people who revere the Alaskan wilderness do not also care about America's energy future; as if the people who produce America's energy do not care about the planet their children will inherit."
Mr. Bush appeared to be weaving a careful political thread, arguing that if America failed to act now, "this great country could face a darker future, a future that is, unfortunately, being previewed in rising prices at the gas pump and rolling blackouts in the great state of California."
Mr. Bush also said rising energy prices had put an intolerable burden on families and farmers. But some of the statistics in his own report seemed to undercut that claim. One chart showed that the share of disposable household income spent on energy had declined to less than 5 percent today from 8 percent during the early days of the Reagan administration. (That percentage has begun to rise again, but only to the levels of the mid-1990's, before a sharp drop in energy prices.)
Mr. Bush talked not only of blackouts but of blackmail, raising the specter of a future in which the United States is increasingly vulnerable to foreign oil suppliers. He argued, for example, that the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, which he wants to open to drilling, can produce 600,000 barrels of oil a day for the next 47 years. "That happens to be exactly the amount the United States now imports from Iraq," he said.
Opening the Alaskan refuge to drilling is just one source of contention with Democrats and some moderate Republicans, many of whom argue that the Bush administration has put undue emphasis on increasing supplies of fossil fuels at the expense of the environment.
Critics say that although the report seems designed to suggest a balanced approach, it minimizes the potential role of alternative sources of energy and the possibility of reducing future demand through efficiency and conservation.
"America must embrace the promise offered by new technologies," said Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut. "The energy crisis is not an excuse for creating an environmental crisis."
Republicans offered far more support for the president. Senator Frank H. Murkowski of Alaska, chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, said he planned hearings next week to begin consideration of 25 recommendations in the Bush report that require legislative action.
"Not everyone is going to like this plan," Mr. Murkowski said, "but at least now we have a plan to kick around."
He said the previous administration had failed to grapple with the nation's energy sources through a comprehensive plan. Clinton administration officials disputed the assertion and blamed Congress for failing to enact energy legislation.
Yet even Mr. Murkowski sounded a note of caution about Mr. Bush's approach. He said the report offered few immediate remedies for California's electricity crisis or for rising gasoline prices. He said Republicans might have to consider a gas-tax rollback or the temporary suspension of some environmental provisions to address supply bottlenecks.
Mr. Bush was praised by many groups for laying out a long-term energy policy. His report contained 105 initiatives — although many of them are endorsements of actions already in place. And while in his public comments he always started with talk of conservation, the report itself was much more specific when it came to tapping new supplies.
"No matter how much we conserve, we're still going to need more energy," he said here this afternoon. "The State of California is the second best state at conservation, and yet they are still running out of energy."
Among those who took a different view was former president Jimmy Carter, who wrote in The Washington Post this morning that the United States did not confront an energy crisis comparable to those of 1973 and 1979.
"World supplies are adequate and reasonably stable, price fluctuations are cyclical, reserves are plentiful," he argued. Mr. Carter said "exaggerated claims seem designed to promote some long-frustrated ambitions of the oil industry at the expense of environmental quality."
Some chapters of the energy plan resemble the annual reports issued by energy companies, with color photos of bears living happily in the wilderness, forests that can absorb carbon dioxide and fly-fishermen wading in pristine water, practicing the favorite sport of the report's main author, Vice President Dick Cheney.
While the report clinically assessed all the available sources of energy and promised to encourage development of those that do the least environmental damage, it fell far short of describing the moon-shot approach to efficiency and renewable energy that was an ambition of the Carter years.